X.com, formerly known as Twitter, Elon Musk’s grandiose attempt to make the world like him again, is making a big change to the app’s core feature set. The social media platform confirmed that it will make ‘likes’ private in a ploy to motivate users to let their true selves shine through online — without any fear of personal persecution in their private lives.
Likes go bye-bye
Yeah, we are making likes private.
Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy” in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.
Soon you’ll be able to like without… https://t.co/vPGllc4pB0
— Haofei (@wanghaofei) May 22, 2024
Haofei Wang, the app’s director of engineering confirmed as much through a post on the platform, noting that many people might feel “discouraged” from liking posts that could be considered “edgy” out of fear that their profile will be targeted by “trolls, or to protect their public image.”
And no, the platform isn’t making likes disappear for good. You’ll still be able to see your likes — they just won’t be paraded around the rest of the platform for all else to see. It isn’t yet clear whether users will still see recommended posts in the ‘For You’ tab from accounts they follow with the ‘X user liked this post’ tag attached.
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Original posters are also privy to see which accounts liked their posts, so keep that in mind before you start going crazy in the dark side of X.com. Whatever your thoughts on the change, it’s likely to upset subscribers of X Premium — the platform’s paid service that sticks a tick next to their names — as hidden likes were a feature that once required a sacrifice of R145/m.